“You know what I hate most?” you ask.
Rafa gives the smallest shrug. “There’s a long list.”
“They always pick people already carrying too much. Sick women. Single mothers. Recent arrivals. Men sending money home. Kids aging out of foster care. People who won’t have a lawyer on speed dial. And then they call it efficiency.”
Rafa nods slowly. “Yeah.”
You do not say the next part aloud, but it walks beside every step you take through that lobby for the next hour. If your mother had met a man like Esteban on the wrong night, and no one powerful had happened to see it, her story would have ended inside a deduction line and a late bus ride. Whole lives get buried that way. Not dramatically. Administratively.
Near 3:00 a.m., Naomi walks over holding a file thick enough to make a satisfying sound when it lands on the marble side table beside you.
“We have forged signatures,” she says. “Off-the-books cash corrections, illegal deductions, likely collusion with the staffing vendor, and at least preliminary witness support for coercion tied to child welfare threats. Also attempted destruction of evidence, which is vulgar but useful.”
“Useful how?”
She gives you a dry smile. “Juries hate men who feed paper to shredders after midnight.”
You glance toward Esteban. He is seated in an armchair near the far wall, no longer looking like management, just another man learning what happens when the room stops agreeing to his version of events. Police officers arrived ten minutes ago and are waiting while the initial evidence chain is documented. He has asked twice for his attorney and once for water. He has not asked once about Carolina.
That tells you all you need.
“There’s one more thing,” Naomi says. “The vendor company is owned by an LLC that traces back to his brother-in-law. They have contracts at two other properties.”
Cold moves under your ribs.
